The LastPilot

One hundred and forty-one. That is every Corrin Line ship I have taken into this channel since the spring my brother died. Not the ones I refused, because there are none. Not the ones that went wrong, because none of them did. A hundred and forty-one hulls, every one of them delivered to a berth with her crew aboard and dry, by the man who had the most reason in this port to let one of them find the bottom.

The night before, I had stood at the station window and looked at a ladder for eleven minutes.

The Kelder was four miles out and her ladder was wrong.

I could see it from the station window, which should not have been possible at that distance, in that rain. That was the point. A pilot ladder rigged properly is a thin line down a wall of steel and you cannot see it at all until you are under it. This one had a shape. There was a bight in it, a slack loop where the side ropes had been made off to the wrong point, and it moved separately from the hull when she rolled.

Ruth came in with two mugs and put one beside the rota board. She looked where I was looking.

"That's the second time this month," she said.

"Third."

She let that sit. Ruth has been on this rota nine years and she knows what I do and do not keep track of, and she has never once asked me why the difference matters.

She sat down anyway, which is what she does instead of pressing. The dayroom at that hour is a kettle, a rota board, a window, and whichever two of us are awake. In nine years Ruth has learned the shape of me the way you learn a channel, by running it often enough in the dark, and she has never once put the leadline down where I did not want it.

The board said VALE against the 0410. My name in my own handwriting, because I had written it there on Sunday when the month was still a shape rather than a series of ships.

"You could call it," Ruth said. "Nobody would say a word."

That was true and it was also not true, in the way that things are when everyone knows the rule and nobody has ever watched it used. A pilot may decline to board a vessel whose transfer arrangements do not meet the standard. It is written down. It is not a favour and it is not discretion. The decision to board is mine and mine only, and there is a form for it, and the form goes to Port State Control, and after that the ship does not move until somebody with a clipboard has looked at the thing I looked at.

I have never sent one. Not in twenty-six years, and not for the three this month, and not for the one in March that was worse than any of them.

There is a shelf above the kettle. On it, between the tide tables and the spare handsets, there is a hardbacked book that nobody has ever asked me about, and in the book there is a line for every ship I have boarded since the spring of the year my brother died, with the date and the state of her arrangements and what I did about it, which in every case is the same word. Boarded. Eleven years of a man writing down that he did nothing, in his own hand, in a drawer in a room with a kettle in it.

"She'll be at the buoy in fifty minutes," I said.

Ruth picked up her mug and did not drink from it. "That isn't an answer."

"No."

Outside, the rain came across the glass in a long unbroken sheet and then stopped, the way it does in that channel, as though somebody had taken a hand away.

Gerry had the cutter out past the mole by twenty to four. I stood in the wheelhouse with my bag between my feet and watched the lights of the Kelder resolve out of the dark, first one and then the whole run of them, a long low working ship riding higher than she should have been.

"Light," Gerry said.

"Ballast."

"She'll roll."

She would. A ship in ballast sits high and takes the sea badly and the ladder at her side goes through an arc that a loaded hull never sees. On a good night that is uncomfortable. On this one it meant the fourteen metres I had to climb would be moving under me the whole way, and the only thing holding the top of it would be whatever they had made it fast to.

I opened the bag and took out the pocket book. It goes where I go. The log stays at the station, on the shelf above the kettle between the tide tables and the spare handsets, because that is where a thing lives when it is not meant to be a thing at all, and the pocket book is what I write in when I am cold and then copy across when I am warm.

I turned to the back and looked at what was written there. Four lines, this year. Four ships, four dates, four short descriptions of an arrangement that did not meet the standard. All of them Corrin Line. None of them reported.

The Kelder would make five.

Gerry took her round under the lee and the noise changed, the engine note dropping away as the hull came between us and the weather, and I put the book back in the bag and closed it.

"Watch yourself," he said.

Up close, in the light they threw down from the deck, it was worse than it had looked from the station.

The ladder itself was sound. Good steps, clean side ropes, no rot in the treads. The fault was at the top, where the whole thing bore. It had been made fast to the rail. Not to a strong point, not to a padeye, not to anything designed to take the weight of a man and the snatch of a rolling ship. To the rail, with two turns and a hitch, by somebody who had done it quickly in the dark because it was the last job before the pilot came.

I stood on the platform of the cutter with my hand on the man rope and did the arithmetic that I do not have to do any more, because I have done it so many times that it happens on its own. Fourteen metres. Nine seconds if it goes at the top. The water under me at eight degrees and the Kelder's side sliding past it, and Gerry good but alone.

The rail would probably hold. Rails usually do. That is the entire problem with rails.

I could go back into the wheelhouse and pick up the handset and say six words, and the Kelder would anchor where she was until morning, and a surveyor would come down and photograph the two turns and the hitch, and it would go into a system that keeps records. It would be the correct decision. It is the decision the standard was written for.

It would also be the first one I had ever made, after eleven years of not making it, against the fleet of the company whose name is on every page in the back of that pocket book. And the first question anybody would ask, before they looked at the rail, is why now.

I put my boot on the bottom step and went up.

I climbed it the way you climb a bad one, which is slowly, with three points on at all times, and without looking at the water, and with the whole of your attention on the small sounds the thing makes. It talked the entire way. Rope against steel has a noise when it is bearing properly, a low working creak that comes and goes with the roll, and it has a different one when it is bearing on an edge. This had the second noise. It came from above me and slightly to the right, which is where the hitch was, and every time the Kelder went over it stopped, and every time she came back it started again.

Nine metres up there is a point where going back down is worse than going on. I passed it without deciding anything, which is how I have passed most things.

At the top the bight took up and dropped me two inches against the hull, and my shoulder went into the plating, and then it held, and a deckhand had my arm and I was over the rail and standing on steel.

"All right, sir?"

"Fine."

He was about twenty. He had rigged it, or he had watched someone rig it, and he did not know there was anything wrong with it, because nobody had ever told him. I looked at the two turns and the hitch for as long as it takes to look at something you intend to remember, and then I said nothing at all about it, and followed him forward.

The bridge was warm and almost silent. One repeater ticking, the fans, the deck humming somewhere a long way below. A young man came away from the chart table with his hand out.

"Captain Byrne. Thanks for coming up in that."

"Amos Vale. Pilot."

He had the passage plan drawn already, which not all of them do, and he had drawn it correctly, which fewer of them do. Clean line past the outer marks, the turn before the bar at the right place, the tidal window noted in the corner in pencil with the height and the time. I put my finger on the turn and found nothing to move.

"That's a good plan," I said.

"I had it checked."

I gave him the speed for the bar and he took it without argument and rang it on, and the note under our feet came down a half-step, and the Kelder settled into the channel the way they do when there is water enough under them to stop counting it.

We stood a while and watched the outer mark come up. He was easy company. He asked one sensible question about the silt and I answered it, and he wrote the answer down, which almost nobody does.

"You'll be sorry to lose us," he said.

I kept my eyes on the mark. "How's that."

"Company's putting four of us in for exemption certificates. I'm one. Spring, they reckon, once we've the sea time." He said it the way a man says a thing he is pleased about and does not think is worth hiding. "Nothing against you. It's the bill, mostly."

The mark came abeam and went down the side and the water opened up ahead of us, black and flat inside the arms of the port.

"Congratulations," I said.

He went back to the chart table. I stood where I was with my hand on the rail and worked out how long spring was, and what a certificate does, and which of their ships I would still be standing on this time next year.

Behind me, four decks down, two turns and a hitch held a ladder to a rail in the dark.